Murder Was the Case

Assasin. That is the name of the game. We have started an elaborate game of assasin, and I can't say much about it. There are about 24 people playing. Everyone has a nickname. Everyone has the real name of the person they're trying to kill. Everyone has the nickname of the person who is trying to kill them.

Starting right now...midnight, 11/20...it begins. And it goes until 12/11 (I think).

How can you be killed? If you are hit in the torso by a nerf bullet (see pic), squirt gun, or handheld spoon (throwing doesn't count). OR, if you open a letter (not email) that says "you're dead" it counts as a letter bomb.

You can have one no-kill alliance in which you share information and help each other get kills.

Everyone is pretty paranoid. Someone has already opened a letter bomb, but it was pre-11/20 so it didn't count. Someone told the person they were after that they were after them. Someone accidentally blurted out the name of who they're after while talking about a brilliant plan.

It is going to be a blast. I only hope I at least get one person before I'm hit.

I'll keep you updated on the mayhem. As soon as we kill someone or get killed we report to the person running it all and get a new person (or remain dead if we were killed).

Apparently Michigan=Bad

The big day. The Big Game. Like I mentioned, we were hired to promote DiGiorno pizza. How? Two of the four of us would be dressed as referrees, the other two as delivery drivers. Because "It's not Delivery, It's DiGiorno!"

While we were waiting to officially start at 11:00am, a crowd of people wearing red and white/grey was already out and about, most of them right across from our tent by the ESPN College Football Broadcast.

Note the sea of red. You know what stands out against this? People wearing normal clothes. You know what stands out even more? Blue and Yellow...The Michigan colors. The Michigan fans were few, and they were yelled at, booed, cursed at...but they stood proud. These teams are always big rivals, but this time OSU is ranked #1 and Michigan is ranked #2...that hasn't happened for 100 years.

Back to the gig. DiGiorno had a truck with 16 microwaves. They were cooking and handing out free pizza. While what? While also attempting to dunk the delivery drivers to win beads. It was about 45 degrees out...and the water was the same. Luckily, Ric and I had wet suits on underneath our outfits. Because of safety, we went from two tanks down to one. One tank was too close to the people getting pizzas and the crowd nearly missed them a few times. Here's Ric watching a ball miss.

I was lucky to catch this. This looks like Ric sitting, but you'll notice his seat is down and he's a couple inches lower. I snapped this right as the ball hit. We ended up doing the dunk tanks for just a little over an hour, then coming back and helping hand out beads. We had a lot of red and silver beads, and a little bit of blue and yellow. We handed out all of the red and silver by the end, and we had blue and gold left over. People were angry that we had the blue and gold in the first place and wanted us to burn them.

Before starting the dunk tanks we would have people play Rock, Paper, Scissors with us for beads. Every once and awhile we play "high stakes"...which meant if they won they got beads for all of their friends, but if they lost they had to wear blue and gold ones. They hated that. Usually if they lost they would take the beads, throw them on the ground and stomp on them. It was great. The award for best super fan goes to the 11 year old kid below.

What's Round on the Ends and High in the Middle?

Ohio, that's what. Today a few of us left for tropical Ohio on a 6:05am flight. We were destined to work for DiGiorno's promoting their pizza in Columbus at OSU...on the day of "The Big Game". They were playing against their major rival, Michigan State. Buckeye vs Wolverine, Red and Grey vs Blue and Yellow.

Apparently it's a big deal. SUCH a big deal that the only available flight was at 6:05am in the morning, because the rest were full. Even at that hour there was talk of the game, and even one guy yelled out "O-H!" to which some people replied "I-O!" It seemed to be a spelling contest of sorts. Lucky for me The Daily Show was recently in Ohio and the audience was chanting like that...so I understood that it was the college spirit chant war cry thing.

A huge SUV limo that can fit 14 people picked us up to take us to our hotel.

While there we went to the mall to visit with Ric's brother. Later we caught "Stranger than Fiction" in the theater. I liked that movie a good amount. It was enjoyable. Not SUPER AWESOME, but I would see it again in the theaters.

Video (and dog poop) Killed the Radio Star

Most of today was spent shooting video for a group I'm in called seven8nine. We have been working hard to get some videos made and a majority of today was spent filming our fourth vid.

And they'll keep coming too. Keep an eye out on www.seven8nine.net for changes in the next month. It's a really fun group of people to work with.

Today we were shooting a scene where three girls were learning about camping from a boy scout. Unfortunately, we also learned that we should look where we step and that dog poop makes one of us nearly throw up. I won't say who, but I WILL say it's not me, and I'll also say I was rolling the whole time so it will probably be on video. We might send it in to AFV though so we'll have to wait and see. It's hilarious.

Chim-Chimney

Today was a little chilly out. It is doing the typical fall thing leading into winter...where the temp gets nice, rains, and then drops 10-20 degrees. Repeat. Today was one of the cold days. It was supposed to snow early in the morning but never really did. How do I know? Because I had to be downtown at 6:30am. The picture above is of the group of Chimney Sweeps responsible for the grand window unveiling at a major name brand retail store that has had holiday window unveilings for years...but I don't want to name names.

It is a fun job. Last year the theme was Cinderella and eleven of us were dressed as soldiers (royal/nutcracker type). This year it's Mary Poppins, so we were Chimney Sweeps. Deanna was in charge of putting together the costumes and did great. I got to help a little...mostly in finding hats. If they fit my head, they'd fit anyone. Plus, we got to be cockney.

Ketchup

Things have been mellow, but good enough to do a quick catch-up.

I'm apparently the face of ComedySportz Chicago now. My face is on a 40ft tall banner, postcards, banner ads on the Blue Line eL, posters, and possibly other stuff.

Deanna got me a cool GPS odometer for running that I finally tested 2 nights ago. It has a virtual trainer...you set what distance you want to run and how fast you want to run it. Once you hit start it shows two little cartoon guys. One is you, one is your trainer. I set it for 5 miles running 9-minute miles. I ran for 4 miles and came in 40 ft behind the trainer...the exact height of the poster of me. I uploaded the data from the run to my computer. It gave me a graph of my speed and my heart rate. My heart rate started at 90 ish and was around 158 for the run. Next I will run the same path and compare speed and heart rate...it lets you do that!

I also took the money my parents gave me and bought an iPod Shuffle. This thing is tiny and holds 250 songs. It's perfect. Thanks, parents!

What else...I shot photos of an improv group today and had my first lamp blow out. I took it in to get repaired and hope it's just a bulb issue.

Oh...I saw Borat. This movie is hilarious and wrong at the same time. The things Sacha Baren Cohen gets away with as this character are hilarious.

More as I think of it...I'm a little tired.

Birthday Bash!

Today is my birthday. PS. Thanks to I think my aunt and uncle for the e-card...I'm pretty sure it is from you guys, but not totally sure.

Today started off like any other day...with a ComedySportz remote show. Deanna was out of town on a gig and came back before I got back. She got me an awesome present. It's a pedometer, but it's GPS. Regular pedometers are about 60% accurate. GPS is much more. It tracks your exact distance, your speed, and even has a thing to track your heart rate. All of this data is saved and can be uploaded to your computer. So if I run the same exact path three days in a row I can compare speed and heart rate. It's awesome. I haven't used it yet because it's cold out...but I will soon.

Deanna made my favorite dinner and then took me out with some friends to a Korean Karaoke place. I'm not even really sure what the place is called because the sign was in Korean...but it is one of those places that has separate rooms that you rent and sing karaoke in.

There were 11 of us (exceding the max capacity of 9). Joey, Rich, Martin, Tara, Sam, Dave, Jen, Gillian, Steph, Deanna, and myself.

One of the fun parts of the experience was that some of the songs had a weird background going on...like a travel video almost...it would inspire us to change lyrics sometimes as you may notice in one of the videos below.

My biggest challenge of the night seemed to be picking a song they had on file. You would look through the book, find your song, then enter the number of the song on a remote. You could queue upto 12 songs. It worked out for me that my song would get to the #1 slot and then say "Disc in use, pick another song" which meant pick another song for the #12 slot. "Ghostbusters" was my nemesis...as was "We Built This City". Neither were available.

Later in the evening I noticed that the books of songs were not orderly. I found another "Ghostbusters" under a different number, and another "We Built This City". Ghostbusters worked. We Built ended up being a song in Korean that I just made up words to.

It was a blast. We were there for about 2 hours and I would easily go back again. Below you'll find the singing styles of Tara and Martin. I recorded them on my small camera...they only record as AVI, which youtube has trouble syncing up...so the audio doesn't match the background too well. But they're fun. THANKS EVERYONE WHO CAME AND SENT WELL WISHES! I am truely blessed and surrounded by Awesomers...practicers of awesome.